Doctor John Henry (J.H.) "Doc" Holliday was born on August 14, 1851 in Griffin, Georgia.
Though many biographical accounts claim Valdosta as his birth place,he did not move to Valdosta until after his mother's death. His father was Henry Burroughs Holliday and his mother was Alice Jane McKay. John was born with a cleft palate which was corrected by his uncle J.S. Holliday and the famed physician Crawford Long.
When John was 15 his mother died of consumption(more commonly known as tuberculosis, the same illness of which Holliday himself later died.) It has been speculated that the young man contracted the illness from her.
John Henry Holliday was highly educated in languages, Greek,French and mainly Latin.
In 1870 he traveled to Philadelphia and began dental school receiving his Doctor of Dental Surgery degree on March 1, 1872.
In September 1873, he traveled to Texas,there he began his career in dentistry. It was around this time that Doc also took up gambling and found it to be very lucrative. It would seem the young dentist had a way with the cards. After a gunfight with a saloon keeper in which no one was hurt,he decided to leave Texas.
Doc used alcohol in an attempt to control his tubercular cough however, it may have hastened his demise.It is believed that it was 1876 when Doc first met Wyatt Earp, the legendary U.S. Marshal however Wyatt recalled first meeting Doc in Fort Griffin,TX in 1877.Holliday said several times that Wyatt was one of the only people he truly called a friend.
In Dodge City,Kansas in 1878 both Doc and Wyatt traveled to make their fortunes in the gambling industry.September 1878, Wyatt was surrounded by a group of people who were out for his blood.Doc Holliday was credited later by Wyatt with saving his life.
Holliday traveled frequently, most famously he wound up in Tombstone, Arizona in 1880, where he took part in the shootout at the O.K. Corral.
There are many legends of Holliday's prowess with a gun, though besides one altercation in which a man named Mike Gordon lost his life,a few saloon fights, and the well known fight at the O.K. Corral, which many believed Doc started himself after an altercation with Ike Clanton, most of the stories surrounding Doc are either complete fiction or greatly overdramitized. However after Holliday died Wyatt Earp had this to say in an interview
"Doc was a dentist whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long lean ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a gun that I ever knew."
Virgil Earp said of him, "There was something very peculiar about Doc. He was gentlemanly, a good dentist, a friendly man and yet, outside of us boys, I don't think he had a friend in the Territory. Tales were told that he had murdered men in different parts of the country; that he had robbed and committed all manner of crimes, and yet, when persons were asked how they knew it, they could only admit it was hearsay, and that nothing of the kind could really be traced to Doc's account. He was a slender, sickly fellow, but whenever a stage was robbed or a row started, and help was needed, Doc was one of the first to saddle his horse and report for duty."
All in all John Henry Holliday known as "the west's deadliest dentist",became better known from legend than from fact. He spent his final days in Glenwood Springs,Colorado eaten up with consumption and deteriorating more and more rapidly.He is believed to have been laid to rest in Glenwood Springs Cemetery, though the accuracy of this assumption is often questioned.
